A rare foray into a McDonald’s the other night. Yes, I know, but my son likes it – and I’m quite fond of their hot apple pies! Eating one of said pies, I was struck by the nutritional information on the packaging:
Graphics are supposed to simplify, to make things clearer, to be readily understandable. These do the opposite, obfuscating the information – as indeed do many proposal graphics, which merely serve to further complicate the already-confusing. (The old adage is “a picture tells a thousand words”, yet we often see overly-complex diagrams better described by “a picture full of a thousand words”).
On reflection, by the way, I thought that maybe the restaurant’s designers had originally come up with a much simpler colour-coding system, that would have been thrown out at the committee stage:
Red: eat lots of these and you will die very young
Amber: eat lots of these and you will die younger than you should
Green: eat lots of these and a long life will be yours, my friend.